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Updated: June 11, 2025
One of his officers, Lieutenant Barry, was to remain with my regiment and initiate us into the mysteries of the flame-lit trenches in front of Fromelles. The regiment paraded on the morning of the 2nd and General Congrieve and Colonel Levison-Gower were on hand to bid us good-bye. It was a very pleasant march. The day was fine and cool and the men in splendid spirits. We reached Bac St.
We were able to do without our old friend, as Fritz very kindly built up in the churchyard at Fromelles a large red earthwork that could be seen for miles, and which our big guns sought unsuccessfully to destroy but made the entrance to it very unhealthy.
On Saturday evening, March 6th, we went into the trenches opposite Fromelles at La Cardonnerie Farm which had been the scene of a very warm action in the previous November. Before we came to Flanders we had been told a great deal about the trenches in the Low Countries.
At the corner there was a shrine which had suffered from shell fire and which Canon Scott had immortalized in a poem, the best he has written and the best I have read since the war began. The next street back is the Rue Du Quesne. Right through the centre of our position ran the Fromelles Road.
The first was north of Neuve Chapelle towards Fromelles, and broke down through inadequate artillery preparation; the second, made on 16 May in front of Richebourg l'Avoué towards the Bois du Biez and Rue d'Ouvert, was somewhat more successful, and Sir John French wrote encouragingly about the entire first line of the enemy's trenches having been captured on a front of 3000 yards with ten machine guns; but one brigade alone lost 45 officers and 1179 men, and La Bassée and the Aubers ridge were as forbidding as ever.
Some of the companies crossed the fields scouting along the ditches and hedges. A company marched by the road Croix Blanche. We found billets at farm houses a few hundred yards east of the corner of the Rue De Bois and the Fromelles road. Across the road from where I was quartered there was a big straw stack which the artillery were using for observation purposes.
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